The Catholic World Report has always struck me as accepting of Vatican II (“properly interpreted,” anyway). As we’re now at the fiftieth anniversary of Vatican II, CWR has devoted its current issue to “Vatican II: Fifty Years Later.” Interestingly, it isn’t all cheerleading. In one of the articles, Edward Pentin asks, and tries to answer, “Why Did Vatican II Ignore Communism?”

While Mr. Pentin would like to give Pope John XXIII the benefit of the doubt, he is in the end very critical, as are several of those he quotes — among them Roberto de Mattei, of the complete failure of the Council’s participants even to mention, much less condemn, Communism when that most anti-Christian of ideologies was at the peak of its influence. Read More »

This post at What Women Never Hear is spot on, especially these first few paragraphs:

[Men and women] differ in so many ways. Women seek emotional fulfillment and they go after it. Men expect sexual fulfillment but they also expect not to have to work hard for it. They will work hard to conquer a woman but not work hard for sex with her afterward. Read More »

IN THE ATLANTIC, Alice Dreger, a professor of “medical humanities” at Northwestern, pondersthe findings of two anthropologists who have discovered two African tribes where homosexuality and masturbation are unknown. These tribes present several puzzles to the liberal mind and their ways of life are instructive. Indeed, I would say anthropologists will be studying them for decades, so rich and interesting are the implications.

On the positive side, one of the tribes, who have been studied by the anthropologists Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, is a model of “gender egalitarianism.” Among the Aka, the women sometimes hunt and often “control distribution of resources.” Does that mean giving out bowls of beans? That’s not clear. Whatever it is, if the women control distribution of something important, even bowls of beans, that’s equality in the feminist sense. Read More »

I WAS mostly away from the computer this weekend and was able only to post quickly the entry about the changed University of California logo. When I returned, I found a half a dozen or so comments that captured the significance of this symbol. The comments so perfectly demonstrated the good sense and insight typical of the readers of this site.

I suggested that the logo, which will not replace the traditional symbol on diplomas, is an expression of the “meaningless university.” But obviously it — both the university and the logo — is filled with meaning.

Liberalism rejects pomp and pageantry and so it seems to eschew symbolism itself. And yet it uses its very pretension to un-pretentiousness quite effectively. This anodyne logo, as seemingly inoffensive as a transit authority sign, is as good as a declaration of hostility upon the culture that created the University of California, the culture of the book, the culture of the Christian West.

As Consultus says:

The removal of the book says, “No content here.”

Of course, that’s not right, either. There is content. It’s all Leftist propaganda.

These changes to accommodate PC do not create peace among factions. Typically, they further embolden those who think their own special group is entitled to take offense.

It is similar, as another reader points out, to this other of bit of liberal regalia: